A JEST.
A man wishing to prove, by the authority of Pythagoras, that he had formerly been in the world, while another would not let him finish his argument, the first speaker said to the second: “It is by this token that I was formerly here, I remember that you were a miller.” The other one, feeling himself stung by these words, agreed that it was true, and that by the same token he remembered that the speaker had been the ass that carried the flour.
A JEST.
It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.
Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.